Uzbek auto market in 2020 falls by 8.6% as the pandemic and restrictions affect sales. Full-Year sales have been 173.756, while the leader Daewoo reports the sharpest drop and underperforms the market, losing 13.6%.
Economic Environment
Cumulative data for January–September suggests the economy remained mostly anemic throughout Q3, as the pandemic and related measures dragged on activity, although output seemingly recovered markedly from Q2’s sharp contraction.
On the production side, agricultural activity saw an uptick in output, as did the construction sector. However, industrial output deteriorated further in Q3 despite a small uptick in manufacturing production, mainly due to a severe contraction in mining and quarrying activity. Moreover, the services sector was fairly weak in the quarter.
Looking at Q4, the recovery could be curtailed by weaker demand abroad as many countries reinstate lockdown measures. Moreover, although domestic Covid-19 cases are notably below the numbers seen in August and September so far in the quarter, a possible flare-up in infections threatens to derail the year-end recovery.
Market Trend
The Uzbek car market has been hit -even if only slightly- in 2020 by the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic, which has nevertheless impacted sales.
Due to the huge import fees, the domestic market is totally controlled by GM Uzbekistan with just marginal space left to other players. However, key steps towards market liberalization started to be taken in 2017. As far as GM Uzbekistan, production raised at 135.471 units, and a new sales system was in place.
In the last three years, the Government reduced excise tax on vehicles by 26% in order to neutralize the consequences of the harmonization of local currency price with the exchange rate to US dollar in the “grey market”. In 2018 new key steps have been taken to open the industry and the stated-controlled, Uzavtosanoat, bought out 100% of GM’s shares in the Asaka car plant.
Sales in 2018 grew up 10% at 139.902 and the trend remained positive in 2019 too, thanks to the reduction of import duties and VAT. In fact, the market reacted quite well and sales accelerated following a robust demand across all the year. Indeed, in 2019 Total sales have been 190.164, up 3.5%.
Indeed, Full-Year sales for 2020 have been 173.756, reporting a 8.6% decrease compared to 2019.
Brand-wise, this year the leader Daewoo (-13.6%) lost 3.1% market share and reported the worst performance, followed by Chevrolet (-1.4%), which gained 2.8% share. Lada on the other hand fell 9.7%. Isuzu remained in 4th place (-1.3%), followed by Man which grew 3.9%.
Hyundai lost 9.7%, followed by Kia (+2.8%) -up 1 spot-, which overtook Toyota and lost 8.5% sales. Closing the leaderboard we have Mercedes losing 12.3% this year and Skoda reporting the best performance on the leaderboard by growing 5.7%.
The most sold vehicle this year has been the Daewoo Nexia (-6%) with 55.506 units sold, followed by the Daewoo Damas, which lost 15.9% registering 40.445 new sales this year. The Chevrolet Cobalt (-30.3%) closes the podium and reports 27.122 new units sold.
Tables with sales figures
In the tables below we report sales for Top 10 Brands and Top 10 models.
